Question for Pierce Harlan, the guy behind the False Rape Society blog: Do you really think this is the best way to fight false rape allegations?
The real problem here isn’t that he’s recycled an old rape joke; it’s that he’s pretending that rapists are somehow a species apart from ordinary men. His big complaint is that the PSA in question “passes off a criminal deviant as a typical guy.”
Pierce, what do you think rapists look like? They’re not villains out of some silent-movie melodrama, twirling their whiskers and cackling with glee. They don’t have giant R’s tattooed on their foreheads. No, they look like “ordinary” guys. Exactly like them. Rape prevention — and crime prevention in general — would be a lot more effective if criminals could be easily identified at a glance. But the world doesn’t work that way. Most criminals look pretty ordinary, actually.
But the problem with Harlan’s stance here go beyond that. The fact is that most rapists aren’t sinister strangers hiding in an alleyway; the overwhelming majority – something like 70% — are people known to their victims. As someone who writes regularly about rape, Pierce is presumably aware of this, which means either that he’s being completely disingenuous, or that he’s simply pretending that date rape (and non-stranger rape in general) doesn’t exist.
The PSA in question is far from perfect. Aside from the terrible acting, the main problem with it is that it it’s victim-blaming. Its depiction of a rapist as an ordinary-looking guy – and a friend of the victim — is the one thing it gets right.
To get an idea of the sort of person who reads (and agrees with) The False Rape Society blog, here are a couple of comments on the, er, “controversy.”
Here’s a comment from YouTube, posted by someone who obviously got there from Harlan’s blog (it appeared after the video was linked at the FRS; before the recent batch of comments, the video hadn’t had a comment for three years).
So the message is that if a guy is being helpful at a party, he’s probably a rapist? This is not a fair psa. It did better than some though, by highlighting the fact that the female friend ditched her.
Apparently, in this guy’s mind, trying to remove the clothes of a woman almost completely incapacitated by alcohol is just a way of being “helpful.”
Meanwhile, on the FRS blog itself:
Anonymous said…
Wow- just like TV- apparently the only people on earth who ever do ANYTHING wrong are white males- preferably fat ones to give feminists a little extra to hate.
While we’re on the subject of false accusations, here’s a strange bit of paranoid word-salad on the subject that I ran across recently from a Reddit Men’s Rightser.
Is it really possible that anyone – including the author and the people upvoting the comment — could actually believe this nonsense? If so, what a strange, sad world they must live in.
EDITED TO ADD: Holly Pervocracy just wrote a great and highly relevant post on what she calls “Slavering Beast Theory.” As she explains:
In the Slavering Beast Theory, there are two kinds of men. Two species, nearly. … There are ordinary guys and there are Slavering Beasts. And they are very, very easy to tell apart. They act different, even look different, to the point where any adult should be able to distinguish them in any casual social setting. …
This dichotomy is how someone can simultaneously believe that women shouldn’t go out after dark because rape is such a big problem and believe that tons of rape accusations are false. It makes perfect sense if you believe there are Slavering Beasts out in the dark, but if an ordinary guy is accused of rape, there must be more to the story. It explains why people are angered by rape prevention tips aimed at men–those are insulting to ordinary guys, and Slavering Beasts won’t listen. And it justifies the belief that abuse victims had it coming: either they were abused by a Slavering Beast and should have known better, or they were abused by an ordinary guy and must have done something terrible to provoke him.
It’s nowhere near the level of an actual charge, but I was falsely accused of (implicitly sexual, I was never privy to the details) harassment on another site, years ago. I was absolutely mystified when the admin first told me about it, because I didn’t remember doing anything of the sort. I initially assumed I had just inadvertently done something to upset her (I do this with women a lot… not really good at this “social” thing). In the end, it turned out a 3rd party (someone I knew and thought I was on good terms with) basically scapegoated me for the harassing he was doing..
I got banned from several places between the time it started and when my name finally got cleared, including most of the RPs I was participating in at the time.
…so yeah, there’s that story. I’ve been waiting for a vaguely relevant time to post it, actually.
@NWO
What exactly makes a woman a slut? Can men be sluts, too? What exactly does treating someone like a slut mean?
Especially in this context ‘treated like sluts’ sounds suspiciously like an euphemism for rape to me.
Not that Holly’s point isn’t awesome, but honestly I think she’s still giving these guys too much credit. I don’t think the problem is just that they don’t understand what consent is – I think the real problem is that they’re pissed off by the fact that the women are, legally and according to current societal standards, allowed to withdraw consent. Notice how their arguments keep circling around the idea that a woman told you that you were allowed to have sex with her (there’s the initial don’t understand how sex works part, women don’t actually have sex because they like it, etc), and then, for no good reason, she changed her mind. And just because she changed her mind, after initially saying that you could have sex with her, now you’re a rapist. Which is totally unfair! Why should she be allowed to change her mind? It’s not like women enjoy sex, so it’s not like her changing her mind was because what you were doing wasn’t fun for her – the reasons women have sex are mysterious, and probably something to do with wanting men to buy them stuff/do them favors. Thus, if a woman initially gives consent and then withdraws it, why the hell would she do that? Women make no sense. Also, they’re less important than men, so why are they allowed to change their minds? They should be grateful that we don’t just hit them over the head and drag them to our caves any more. And so on.
I really don’t think it’s just about not understanding consent – I think that they are really, really pissed off about the fact that the societal definition of consent used to be that once you get it it’s yours for life and good for any further occasions on which you want to have sex with that woman, and now the societal definition is shifting to one in which consent is something that you have to continually make sure that you still have, and women can withdraw it at any time for any reason. I think a whole lot of the pushback we’re seeing from men about false rape allegations and feminist conversations about rape is really about that. They find the idea that women can withdraw consent totally unacceptable, and they want society to shift back to the old way of defining consent. They also know that feminism is a big part of why the definitions are shifting (and they’re right about that), and they’re mad as hell about it.
“The real problem here isn’t that he’s recycled an old rape joke; it’s that he’s pretending that rapists are somehow a species apart from ordinary men.”
Well, good thing ordinary women can’t be rapists eh?
NWO, in the event that the case goes to trial where it is quite literally a she said/he said situation, the standard is beyond a reasonable doubt and the jury is determining credibility of the witnesses.
So if there is zero physical evidence, the jury will decided based on how credible they think the state’s witnesses are and/or the defense witnesses (if any testify which is not required.)
There, an exact answer to your question. Now go to hell.
That would be almost as good a thing as you reading for comprehension ^.^
I do know someone accused of rape, and while it’s a he said/she said situation, I come down firmly on her side. I’ve never met this woman, but she had enough evidence and corroboration that my baby brother was kicked out of college for it. By Mr. Slave’s dreaded Title IX even, probably. Thing is, my baby brother has always had trouble with respecting other people’s boundaries, and has a drug problem, so when I heard the story about why he was kicked out, my reaction was, yeah, I can totally see him doing that. It didn’t have any real effect on his life, very few people know about it, and it didn’t prevent him from getting into another college, like, immediately. Nor has it prevented him for getting and holding a job. In fact, he only had to report to the college board and the woman didn’t press actual criminal charges. Another “ruined” life there.
It’s an MRA article of faith that, on the word of a woman, a man can be taken to jail. This is the ‘institutionalised violence’ they they fetishise about. Another MRA article of faith is that, on the word of a woman, a man will have all of his possessions, property, liberty and childrem removed from him. It’s very difficult to remonstrate with MRAs about this – so I generally don’t. The thing is, they *want* to believe this. They *have* to believe this to justify their idiotic stances and appalling convictions.
Sometimes people just get falsely accused of random stuff; it sucks but the whole point of our legal system is pretty much not to let that slide. And honestly, when I was falsely accused of stealing a toy in 3rd grade by a “popular kid” posse my life was ruined more than the lives of most men accused (and not convicted) of rape. 9_9
I would imagine it wouldn’t be just them, but other MRAs too. Maybe not all of them, but the real crazies. I laugh at it too, but then I think about the holocaust. You want to believe rationality and morality will prevail, but there’s always a sliver of doubt.
Yeah, I know, in an infinite universe all things are possible, but NWO himself has no idea how his Gorean utopia could possibly come to pass. He wants women rounded up and each of us parceled off to a male slaveowner, but he wants it done without the help of the hated Big Daddy government. So…who is doing the parceling here? Then there’s the idea that everyone will just go along with this, and no man will say, “Um, sorry, I don’t actually want responsibility for this random woman you dropped on my doorstep,” and…
See, I’m already putting more thought into it than he has. He has no idea how this would work. He just wants to sit in the middle of the street and cry that nobody will do it for him.
Hell, even a lot of MRAs wouldn’t go along with this plan. Some of them are Going Their Own Way and want nothing to do with women, some of them are PUAs and the slave system would interfere with their need for lots of single women to harass, Anthony Zarat just wants a robot girlfriend, MRAL would get pissed at his lady-slave for spitting on him, and so on.
Indeed. And falsely accusing someone of rape is quite rightly recognised as a serious crime with serious consequences. In fact, sometimes it doesn’t even matter if a named individual is accused – in a recent case in Britain, a woman who couldn’t even identify her alleged rapist was given a sixteen-week suspended prison sentence and 200 hours community service (i.e. compulsory unpaid work) after belatedly admitting that she made the whole thing up. The official charge was “wasting police time”, since they spent dozens of hours trawling through CCTV footage and forensically examining the location of the alleged rape.
In those rare cases where identifiable individuals are falsely accused, the penalties for their accusers can be very severe indeed, including substantial prison sentences. And since these cases are usually given maximum publicity by the kind of tabloid newspapers that would like to pretend that false rape accusations are much more common than they actually are, these convictions are accompanied by maximum public humiliation.
So what exactly is in it for the accusers? A false accusation will guarantee hours of detailed questioning by suspicious detectives (indeed, their job is to be suspicious and look for holes in the story), humiliating physical examinations and the possibility of far worse if the accusation is proven to be false. And while I accept that a small number of women might not think this through beforehand, it’s so clearly a massive risk that it’s not at all surprising that very few such cases actually make it to court – in most cases, a single glaring inconsistency at the police interrogation stage is enough to persuade them not to take it any further.
You know that he’s missed the point and won’t admit that he’s wrong when he employs his tricky sleight-of-hand, engaging in his version of “Zero Sum”, which he appears to think is some kinda Milton Bradley game for the interwebz.
Here’s an other example of a guy that agree with the False Rape Society : It’s a guy that say that provocative female attire is an assault against men :
http://www.inmalafide.com/blog/2011/11/01/provocative-female-attire-is-an-assault-against-men/
Norwegian rape apologist Eivind Berge is convinced that ‘rape’ doesn’t exist unless the woman explicitly tries to fight off her accuser, regardless of the fact that such an action might well leave her in an even worse position. He also thinks that men who are sexually abused by women are “lucky”.
In fact, this was the guy who got me interested in MRA pathology in the first place, especially when he let slip that he’d barely been laid throughout his entire adult life, a detail that underpins pretty much everything he writes. He seems to have a girlfriend now, but that hasn’t stopped him from writing screeds with titles like ‘Does the Emancipation of Women Always Herald Civilizational Collapse?’
Sorry, when I said ‘accuser’, I obviously meant ‘attacker’.
@no more mr nice guy,
And one commenter there is spot-on just with this sentence alone:
“Face it, if women were walking around in burkas, you’d be complaining about that too.”
“@NWO
“Men don’t say women should expect to be raped, they say women who are sluts should be treated like sluts.”
What exactly makes a woman a slut? Can men be sluts, too? What exactly does treating someone like a slut mean?
Especially in this context ‘treated like sluts’ sounds suspiciously like an euphemism for rape to me.”
While we’re sticking with gender equality here, I consider any overtly promiscuous man a slut. Any guy that cat-calls, makes the first move, harasses or even rapes women is a slut. Any guy who wears open collared shirts, tight jeans and too much cologne and hair gel, for the purpose of getting laid, is a slut. Any man who wants to skip right to sex on the first date is a slut. Any man who defines sex as the sole reason for his existence, is a slut. Did I miss anything here?
This convicted rapist did six years for assaulting his wife. Now after their divorce, the court has determined that she owes him alimony. Oh yeah, the courts are SO STACKED against the man:
http://www.10news.com/news/29656942/detail.html
And I already know the MRA response to this. He should have never been convicted of rape, right?
What a scumbag.
Haha, I was out last night and missed NWO’s stunning interpretation of my post, the one where I called all men slavering beasts. What a shame.
Someone I know intimately was once falsly accused of sexual harassment. He had to leave his job and was extremely upset by the whole ordeal. Strangely enough, this did not make him conclude that all women are evil, that all sexual assault charges are false, or that all men are persecuted by society. You pretty much have to have it in you to become an MRA, being hard done by is not an excuse.
@Wetherby: Yes, Eivind Berge is pretty much as horrible as they get. Of course, he also doesn’t believe a husband should ever be able to be convicted for raping his wife, and thinks that the age of consent should be lowered to 12 or 13 years since it’s perfectly natural for all red-blooded males to want to sleep with “nubile young teens” (his words, NOT mine).
Morning, all.
I forgot to include the second part of my answer to Lyssatakeabow last night. While I’ve known one guy, maybe two, who’s been accused of rape…kinda…unofficially…not that anything came of it…I’ve known maybe six or seven women who’ve been raped (some who felt comfortable discussing it with me personally, some who surprised me at Take Back the Night events). If you lower the bar to include sexual assault, sexual abuse, coercion by a partner (i.e. saying yes because you don’t feel you have the option to say no), it starts to look like car accidents: everyone has one, it’s just a question of whether you walk away with a few bruises or end up in the hospital (or the ground).
No, it is not. Rarely do people who make false rape accusations receive jail time, let alone prison time, and those who do often get suspended sentences. Most often the false accuser only gets a talking to by a judge. The media coverage is at best minimal in most cases, and there is little, if any, public humiliation beyond the false accuser making an ass out of herself by making a false allegation.
Attention, sympathy, support, revenge, and other egotistical machinations. The people who support female rape victims would never question a false accuser’s story, and would continue to support those women and their false stories even after they were proven false (see the feminist response to the Duke and Hofstra cases). Likewise, a rape accusation carries a lot of social weight, and depending on the status of the accuser and the accused, it can carry even greater weight. Most women who make false accusations do not expect anyone to question their story.
What usually catches them up is that there is no evidence to support their claim, and even then that only works in cases in which the alleged assault occurred recently. In older cases, it would mean nothing, which is part of the reason why false accusations of rape are so scary. A woman making a false accusation faces little risk. As long as the woman’s story sounds convincing and she does not make it up as she goes along, plenty of people will believe her and give her the emotional support or hate the falsely accused just like she wanted. In that sense, it is the perfect crime because even if it is proved that the accusation is false, plenty of people, particularly feminists, will always believe “something” happened.
“The people who support female rape victims would never question a false accuser’s story,”
No. I know of someone who claimed she was raped. Given her demeanor about the statement and her known attention seeking ways, everyone, including her boyfriend at the time was, skeptical. Everything is taken into account. Innocent till proven guilty etc.
Must be horrible living in that paranoia bubble of yours.
I think you may have something there. I can’t tell how many times I’ve heard someone – MRA or garden-variety misogynist – cite the “fact” that if a woman consents to sex, then tells the man to stop mid-intercourse, and he doesn’t stop within 30 seconds, it’s rape.
Of course, they’re outraged by this. It’s practically giving women a license to False Accuse men! It’s a trap! How can a man be expected to stop that quickly?
Meanwhile, I’m thinking of the times that a partner has asked me to stop. Almost without exception, it’s because something hurts. In those circumstances, 30 seconds is a long-ass time.